Cheltenham Ladies' College, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom
At the age of 18, Sinclair was sent to Cheltenham Ladies' College, a pioneering boarding school for girls, where she made a highly favorable impression on the principal, Dorothea Beale.
College/University
Career
Gallery of May Sinclair
1905
May Sinclair in the mid-1900s.
Gallery of May Sinclair
1905
Portrait of May Sinclair, by E. Huggins.
Gallery of May Sinclair
1910
British writer Mary Amelia St. Clair, who wrote under the pseudonym May Sinclair, circa 1910. She was also a prominent modernist literary critic and active in the women's suffrage movement.
Gallery of May Sinclair
1910
Kensington, London, United Kingdom
May Sinclair entering Kensington's Women's Social & Political Union shop in 1910.
Gallery of May Sinclair
1912
May Sinclair approximately in 1912 by Frederic Taber Cooper.
Gallery of May Sinclair
1912
Kensington, London, United Kingdom
Kensington Women's Social & Political Union shop-front, Mary Sinclair standing outside shop with 'Victory Through Prison' poster together with children and other suffragettes, leaflets, flags and an image of Emmeline Pankhurst in a shop window, inscription in pencil on reverse 'Mary Sinclair, Kensington, 1910'.
British writer Mary Amelia St. Clair, who wrote under the pseudonym May Sinclair, circa 1910. She was also a prominent modernist literary critic and active in the women's suffrage movement.
Kensington Women's Social & Political Union shop-front, Mary Sinclair standing outside shop with 'Victory Through Prison' poster together with children and other suffragettes, leaflets, flags and an image of Emmeline Pankhurst in a shop window, inscription in pencil on reverse 'Mary Sinclair, Kensington, 1910'.
Cheltenham Ladies' College, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom
At the age of 18, Sinclair was sent to Cheltenham Ladies' College, a pioneering boarding school for girls, where she made a highly favorable impression on the principal, Dorothea Beale.
(The Fieldings are a family that tries to love her, tries ...)
The Fieldings are a family that tries to love her, tries to help her forget her sorrows - and they try to take care of her. Too many things remind Anne of her dead mother, however, and so she has a difficult time returning the affections of the matriarch. When she finally begins to love them, she is sent off again for school. By the time she returns, she discovers that the family children have grown, as had she. They begin to love each other more than brother and sister. But will they survive the ravages of war to find their happily ever after?
(Uncanny Stories is a collection of tales of the supernatu...)
Uncanny Stories is a collection of tales of the supernatural. Eerie, startling and, of course, macabre, they are also terribly civilized and incredibly filmic. May Sinclair was an innovator of the modern thriller fiercely admired by H.P. Lovecraft; a late Victorian who was also a precursor to Virginia Woolf. She combines the traditional ghost story with a twisted psychological approach incorporating the revelations of Freud and Einstein.
May Sinclair was a British writer and suffragist. She was known for her innovations in the development of the psychological novel.
Background
Ethnicity:
May Sinclair's father was Scottish and her mother was Irish.
May Sinclair was born Mary Amelia Saint Clair Sinclair on August 23, 1863, in Rock Ferry, Cheshire, United Kingdom to the family of a Liverpool shipowner William Sinclair and Amelia Hind. She was the sixth child and only daughter.
Amelia Hind was puritanical; William Sinclair was a heavy drinker and womanizer. He had inherited a shipping business but in 1870, when Sinclair was seven, he went bankrupt. The family broke up, never to reunite, and from then on she lived in a succession of different parts of England with her mother, suddenly forced into genteel poverty. She was always secretive about her early years and biographers have found it difficult to unravel the details. Several have inferred its outline from her later novel Mary Olivier, however, which appears to be strongly autobiographical. It implies that she was involved in a prolonged love-hate relationship with her mother and that, thirsty for the formal education that had been granted to her brothers but denied her, retreated into books and learning.
All her brothers were heavy drinkers and all died prematurely, as did her estranged father, leading her to expect that her heredity probably condemned her too to a premature grave.
Education
Largely self-educated, May Sinclair apparently seized upon reading as a survival outlet and read philosophy as well as literature.
At the age of 18, Sinclair was sent to Cheltenham Ladies' College, a pioneering boarding school for girls, where she made a highly favorable impression on the principal, Dorothea Beale. Her first published work was a school essay on Descartes that Beale published in the college's magazine, which shows incredible maturity and insight for a largely self-taught teenager. After just one year Sinclair left school but her friendship with Beale persisted in a long and profound correspondence. Beale was alarmed to find Sinclair losing her conventional Christian faith but introduced her to the writings of T. H. Green, whose Anglicized version of German philosophical idealism filled part of the religious void in her life, as it did for many of her spiritually restless contemporaries. Beale remained an influential figure and tried to discourage Sinclair from writing fiction, which she regarded as a frivolous alternative to straight philosophy.
Making her first attempts in writing career at Cheltenham Ladies' College, May Sinclair was strong enough to go ahead with her fiction in any event but never lost interest in its philosophical underpinnings and wrote two full-scale philosophical studies, A Defence of Idealism (1917) and The New Idealism (1922), much later in life. During the 1880s and 1890s, chronically impoverished, she published several translations from German, in which she was fluent, on subjects as diverse as church history and army reform. She also wrote and published a book of poetry, Nakiketas, a poetical rendering of her philosophical quest, under a male pseudonym, "Julian Sinclair." Her first novel, Audrey Craven (1897), coincided with a move to London after more than a decade in secluded coastal Devonshire. It too was a fictional vindication of her idealistic philosophy. With letters of encouragement from two of the great novelists of her day, Henry James and George Gissing, Sinclair then began work on The Divine Fire. Its publication in 1904 transformed her overnight from a struggling, almost anonymous figure into a novelist famous throughout the English-speaking world.
The Divine Fire also bears the imprint of Green's philosophy, which emphasized the importance of self-realization and of being true to one's self in the face of all obstacles. It tells the story of a Cockney poet who overcomes a series of adversities, including low social class and being disowned by his father, in pursuit of a career in literature. His inner reward is the knowledge that he has been true to himself; his outer reward is the hand in marriage of Lucia, the heroine, whom he wins from an opportunistic rival. The novel's popularity in England was outstripped by the acclaim it received in New York. Sinclair's American publisher, Henry Holt, invited her to tour America and promote it. On this visit, she met President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House and stayed with novelist Sarah Orne Jewett. She also attended Mark Twain's 70th birthday party. He found her so impenetrably shy and silent that at the end of dinner he thanked her for "a remarkably interesting silence." From then on, she visited America regularly and remained a favorite of American readers until the 1930s.
Despite her reticence, Sinclair gradually became an important figure on the British literary scene, not only as a writer but as a critic of fiction and poetry. Like her contemporaries H.G. Wells and Samuel Butler, and like her juniors James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, she was in revolt against what she thought of as the stifling conventions of Victorian middle-class life. She was sympathetically interested in daring literary experiments, opposed censorship, and was among the first critics to see the real genius in the poetry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. She acclaimed Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" at a time when it was slighted by most other critics, and she protested in public against the suppression of Lawrence's novel The Rainbow in 1915. She became a London literary host, encouraging and welcoming writers from her own and younger generations to her house in St. John's Wood. Among them were many of the prominent English writers of the years 1900 to 1930, including H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, Bertrand Russell, Hugh Walpole, Rebecca West, and the spiritualist Evelyn Underhill, and such visiting Americans as Upton Sinclair, Ezra Pound, and Sinclair Lewis. She never served alcohol, however, remembering her father's and her brothers' fatal drunkenness.
Sinclair's writing continued to explore the psychological burden of family life. In The Helpmate (1907), a censorious Victorian bride discovers that her husband had had a sexual affair before meeting her. She punishes him by trying to "uplift" him to a form of perpetual chastity but the husband regards sex as a physiological drive he cannot deny, and he eventually reacts by having another affair. His bitter comment: "It's as simple as hunger and thirst: and if there's no clean water you drink dirty water." The reconciliation scene at the end, where the wife yields to his demands, was shocking for its time; its message was that spiritual love needs the support of sexual love and that the Victorian ideal of the sexless helpmeet was destructive.
The Helpmate, and other successors to The Divine Fire, began to address themes of social injustice. It was a jarringly "realistic" view of family life by comparison with her earlier works. A later novel, The Combined Maze (1913), explored the economic forces pressing down on lower middle- and upper-working-class families and stifling their aspirations. A social and political reform particularly close to Sinclair's heart was votes for women. She became an advocate of female suffrage, contributed regularly to the journal Votes for Women, and wrote a treatise on the philosophy of feminism. She even marched on behalf of suffrage in a London parade and later conveyed her experiences into The Tree of Heaven (1917), a pro-suffrage novel. At the same time, she was dismayed by the increasingly violent tactics used by some of the militant suffragists led by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, which included arson fires and campaigns of smashing London shop windows in the years 1910 to 1912. Her characters Mrs. Blathwaite and her daughter Angela are thinly disguised versions of the Pankhursts and her heroine, Dorothy, condemns their bullying intolerance.
Sinclair also pioneered in the use of "stream of consciousness" narration, particularly to invoke the feelings of young children as they come to apprehend the world. Her novel The Three Sisters (1914) is an early fictional treatment of suppressed sexuality and intergenerational sexual rivalry. Some critics (especially the men) found it embarrassingly frank in its insistence on women's sexuality and its denial of the Victorian ideals of saintly self-sacrifice in women. Her postwar novel Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922) pursued Freud's themes of sublimation and hysteria, showing how energy that cannot be used sexually is diverted into the constructive work of civilization or, if something goes wrong, into hysteria.
In 1914, the outbreak of the First World War interrupted Sinclair's literary and philosophical work. Although she was now 51, she volunteered to serve in an ambulance brigade with the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium. She had expected to be terrified by the carnage of battle but, oddly, found her role exciting and even pleasurable; she said seeing the war was a way of "touching Reality at its highest point in a secure and effortless consummation." Independent-minded, and far older than most members of the force, however, she soon proved unsuited to the work and her commander, Dr. Hector Munro, urged her to return to Britain where she could put her considerable talents to work as a fundraiser. Her few weeks in Belgium did, however, give her a taste of the war's reality and prevented her from the romanticization of the conflict which remained common to Britons on the "home front." Nevertheless, she did think the war worth fighting and shared the spirit of war-glorification of most of her contemporaries - a theme evident in the last sections of The Tree of Heaven. She published her Belgium journals and donated the royalties to the ambulance service. Tasker Jevons (1916) was another element of her contribution to the war effort, a novel about a successful writer who saves his failing reputation by acting heroically as an ambulance volunteer in the war. She modeled the character of Jevons on her friend and literary rival Arnold Bennett.
In the postwar years, Sinclair continued to publish prolifically. Mary Olivier (1919), a fictional rendering of her childhood in impressionistic or "imagist" style, is now regarded by many critics, especially feminists, as her masterpiece. Unlike her wartime books, it was self-consciously artistic, with the stream of consciousness method more highly developed than ever before, and comparable to that of Dorothy Richardson 's Pilgrimage, which she had praised in an enthusiastic review. Some of it was written in the second person singular: "When you smelled mignonette you thought of Mamma and Mark and the sumach tree, and Papa standing on the steps, and the queer laugh that came out of his beard. When it rained you were naughty and unhappy because you couldn't go out of doors." It contained an attack on Victorian religiosity as shallow and punitive, and built up a powerful indictment of parents' stifling of their children's ambitions. Its heroine, Mary, struggles against the constraints of convention and propriety to become a real individual, a struggle played out in a symbolic interaction of light and darkness. Although Mary spends 20 years nursing her mother and is forced to renounce her lover, she begins to succeed as a writer (as had Sinclair herself) and to feel she is true to her real self.
In 1931 after a last burst of creativity and the publication of four novels in four years, Sinclair was forced to stop writing because of the onset of Parkinson's disease. She moved from London to Bierton, near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, where she lived with her housekeeper and companion Florence Bartrop, who had joined her in 1919. The last 15 years of her life were a disappointing anticlimax after her three decades of eminence. By then, such philosophers as Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein were eclipsing the memory and reputation of her mentor T.H. Green, while a new literary generation, notably Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, was pushing further the literary methods she had helped to develop. Sinclair lived through the Second World War and died quietly in 1946 at Bierton.
Sinclair was losing her Christian faith because of her controversial religious education in the childhood but the writings of T. H. Green filled part of the religious void in her life and she accepted some of the contemporary Anglican views.
Politics
May Sinclair was an active and well-known participant of the suffragist movement of her time. She was a member of Woman Writers’ Suffrage League.
Views
May Sinclair was to become interested in the Idealistic philosophy of T.H. Green, about which she wrote two books: A Defense of Idealism in 1917 and The New Idealism in 1922. She was an early adherent of psychoanalysis and, from middle age, an increasingly socially conscious feminist active in the suffrage movement. She reacted enthusiastically to the works of Sigmund Freud, sharing his view of the psychological struggle and repression that takes place as a child is socialized into the world, and the psychosexual drama of parent-child relationships. She befriended Ernest Jones, the pioneer of English psychoanalysis who was also Freud's first English translator and contributed funds for establishing the first psychoanalytic clinic in London.
Quotations:
"If you don't believe in yourself, you'll have some difficulty in making other people believe in you."
"People in great trouble don't change to other people. They only change to themselves."
"Knowing reality is knowing that you can't lose it."
"At the moment you are no longer an observing, reflecting being; you have ceased to be aware of yourself; you exist only in that quiet, steady thrill that is so unlike any excitement that you have ever known."
Membership
Woman Writers’ Suffrage League
,
United Kingdom
Personality
Through her whole life, Sinclair suffered from her difficult family relationship. Her personality issues made her on a certain point to turn to psychoanalysis.
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Thomas Hill Green, Sigmund Freud
Connections
May Sinclair was never married and had no children.
Contemporary Authors, Vol. 166
This volume of Contemporary Authors contains biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers.
1998
May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern
The volume is a crucial contribution to our understanding of the political, social, and literary currents of the modernist period.
2016
May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian
The book draws on newly discovered manuscripts to tell the story of this woman whose emotional isolation bears witness to the great price Victorian women had to pay for their intellectual freedom.
2000
May Sinclair: Re-Thinking Bodies and Minds
This book brings together the most recent research on Sinclair and re-contextualises her work both within and against dominant Modernist narratives.